Develop Reference

Issue with find and replace apostrophe( ' ) in a Word Docx using OpenXML and Regex

Word seems to use a different apostrophe character than Visual Studio and it is causing problems with using Regex.
I am trying to edit some Word documents in C# using OpenXML. I am basically replacing [[COMPANY]] with a company name. This has worked pretty smoothly until I have reached my corner case of companies with names that end in s. I end up with issue s where sometimes it creates a s's.
Example:
Company Name: Simmons
Text in Doc: The [[COMPANY]]'s business is cars.
Result: The Simmons's business is cars.
This is improper English.
I should be able to just use a basic find and replace like I did for [[COMPANY]], but it is not working.
Regex apostropheReplace = new Regex("s\\'s");
docText = apostropheReplace.Replace(docText, "s\'");
This does not. It seems that Word is using an different character for and apostrophe(') than the standard one that is created when I use the key on my keyboard in Visual Studio. If I write a find and replace using my keyboard it will not work, but if I copy and paste the apostrophe from Word it does.
Regex apostrophyReplace = new Regex("s\\’s");
docText = apostrophyReplace.Replace(docText, "s\'");
Notice the different character in the Regex for the second one. I'm confused as to why this is, and also want to know if the is a proper way of doing this. I tried "'" but that does not work. I just want to know if using the copied character from Word is the proper way of doing this, and is there a way to do it so that both characters work so I don't have an issue with docs that may be created with a different program.

The reason this happens is because they are different characters.
Word actually changes some punctuation characters after you type them in order to give them the right inclination or to improve presentation.
I ran in the very same issue before and I used this as regular expression: [\u2018\u2019\u201A\u201b\u2032']
So essentially modify your code to:
Regex apostropheReplace = new Regex("s\\[\u2018\u2019\u201A\u201b\u2032']s");
docText = apostropheReplace.Replace(docText, "s\'")
I found these were the five most common type of single quotes and apostrophes used.
And in case you come across the same issue with double quotes, here is what you can use: [\u201C\u201D\u201E\u201F\u2033\u2036\"]

Answering the question:
Is there a way to do it so that both characters work?
If you want one Regex to be able to handle both scenarios, this is perhaps a simple and readable solution:
Regex apostropheReplace = new Regex("s\\['’]s");
docText = apostropheReplace.Replace(docText, "s\'")
This has the added benefit of being understandable to other developers that you are attempting to cover both apostrophe cases. This benefit gets at the other part of your question:
If using the copied character from Word is the proper way of doing this?
That depends on what you mean by "proper". If you mean "most understandable to other developers," I'd say yes, because there would be the least amount of look-up needed to know exactly what your Regex is looking for. If you mean "most performant", that should not be an issue with this straightforward Regex search (some nice Regex performance tips can be found here).
If you mean "most versatile/robust single quote Regex", then as #Leonardo-Seccia points out, there are other character encodings that might cause trouble. (Some of the common Microsoft Word ones are listed here.) Such a solution might look like this:
Regex apostropheReplace =
new Regex("s\\['\u2018\u2019\u201A\u201b]s");
docText = apostropheReplace.Replace(docText, "s\'")
But you can certainly add other character encodings as needed. A more complete list of character encodings can be found here - to add them to the above Regex, simply change the "U+" to "u" and add it to the list after another "\" character. For example, to add the "prime" symbol (′ or U+2032) to the list above, change the RegEx string from
Regex("s\\['\u2018\u2019\u201A\u201b]s")
to
Regex("s\\['\u2018\u2019\u201A\u201b\u2032]s")
Ultimately, you would be the judge of what character encodings are the most "proper" for inclusion in your Regex based on your use cases.

c# regex I cannot remove two lines from text because of the spacing

I am trying to remove one of the lines from an xml but I cannot remove it because of the spacing, I guess. Can anybody help me with REGEX? I am not very expert on it.
here is my xml lines that I want to remove...
<otv_ek44_Bildirimi>
<otv_ek44_Bildirimi>
I want to remove one these two lines from xml regardless of any spacing before,middle or after. How can I do that?
here is my poor code.
string s2 = #" <otv_ek44_Bildirimi>
<otv_ek44_Bildirimi>";
fileContents = Regex.Replace(fileContents, s2, "");

If you really want to use Regex, try replacing the spaces in your s2 regular expression with \s+ (=match for more than one whitespace character - space, tab, etc.).
string s2 = #"\s+<otv_ek44_Bildirimi>
\s+<otv_ek44_Bildirimi>";
I would strongly suggest using string.Replace(old, new) in this case.
Furthermore, I suggest to not modify XML or any structured data with string manipulation or Regex. You could use an XML parser, or use CsQuery to run jQuery(CSS)-like queries on your XML and manipulate it that way.

Import data from CSV file with comma in string cells

I want to import data from a CSV file, But some cells contain comma in string value. How can I recognize which comma is for separate and which is in cell content?

use TextFieldParser :usage
using Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO; //Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll
...
using(var csvReader = new TextFieldParser(reader)){
csvReader.SetDelimiters(new string[] {","});
csvReader.HasFieldsEnclosedInQuotes = true;
fields = csvReader.ReadFields();
}

In general, do not bother writing the import yourself.
I have good experiences with the FileHelpers lib.
http://www.filehelpers.com/
And indeed, I hope your fields are quoted. Filehelpers supports this out of the box.
Otherwise there is not much you can do.

Unless you have quotes around the strings you are pretty much hosed, hence the "quote and comma" delimiter style. If you have control of the export facility then you must select "enclose strings quotes" or change the delimiter to something like a tilde or carat symbol.
If not well then you have to write some code. If you detect "a..z" then start counting commas and then keep working through string until you detect [0..9] and even then this is going to be problematic since people can put a [0..9] in their text. At best this is going to be a best efforts process. Your going to have to know when you are in chars and when you are not going to be in chars. I doubt even regex will help you much on this.
The only other thing I can think of is to run through the data and look for commas. Then look prior to and after the comma. If you are surrounded by chars then replace the comma with alternate char like the carat "^" symbol or the tilde "~". Then process the file as normal then go back and replace the alternate char with a comma.
Good luck.

using FileHelper is defnitley way to go. They have done a great job building all the logic for you. I had the same issue where i had to parse a CSV file having comma as part of the field. And this utility did the job very well. All you have to do is to use fillowing attribute on to the field
[FieldQuoted('"', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
For details http://www.filehelpers.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=391

We can use RegEx also as bellow.
Regex CSVParser = new Regex(",(?=(?:[^\"]*\"[^\"]*\")*(?![^\"]*\"))");
String[] Fields = CSVParser.Split(Test);

How to extract string between 2 markers using Regex in .NET?

I have a source to a web page and I need to extract the body. So anything between </head><body> and </body></html>.
I've tried the following with no success:
var match = Regex.Match(output, #"(?<=\</head\>\<body\>)(.*?)(?=\</body\>\</html\>)");
It finds a string but cuts it off long before </body></html>. I escaped characters based on the RegEx cheat sheet.
What am i missing?

I'd recommend using the HtmlAgilityPack instead - parsing HTML with regular expressions is very, very fragile.
The latest version even supports Linq so you can get your content like this:
HtmlWeb web = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlDocument doc = web.Load("http://stackoverflow.com");
string html = doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("body").Single().InnerHtml;

Regex is not meant for such html handling, as many here would say. Without having your sample web page / html, I can only say that try removing the non-greedy ? quantifier in (.*?) and try. After all, a html page will have only one head and body.

Though regexes are definitely not the best tool for this task, there are a few suggestions and points I would like to make:
un-escape the angle brackets - with the # before your string, they are going through to the regex and they do not need to be escaped for a .NET regex
with your regex, you need to make sure that the head/body tag combinations do not have any white-space between them.
with your regex, the body tag cannot have any attributes.
I would suggest something more like:
(?<=</head>\s*<body(\s[^>]*)?>)(.*?)(?=</body>\s*</html>)
this seems to work for me on the source of this page!

As the others have said, the correct way to handle this is with an HTML-specific tool. I just want to point out some problems with that cheat-sheet.
First, it's wrong about angle brackets: you do not need to escape them. In fact, it's wrong twice: it also says \< and \> match word boundaries, which is both incorrect for .NET, and incompatible with the advice about escaping angle brackets.
That cheat-sheet is just a random collection of regex syntax elements; most of them will work in most flavors, but many are guaranteed not to work in your particular flavor, whatever it happens to be. I recommend you disregard it and rely instead on .NET-specific documents or Regular-Expressions.info. The books Mastering Regular Expressions and Regular Expressions Cookbook are both excellent, too.
As for your regex, I don't see how it could behave the way you say it does. If it were going to fail, I would expect it to fail completely. Does your HTML document contain a CDATA section or SGML comment with </body></html> inside it? Or is it really two or more HTML documents run together?

Parsing a CSV File with C#, ignoring thousand separators

Working on a program that takes a CSV file and splits on each ",". The issue I have is there are thousand separators in some of the numbers. In the CSV file, the numbers render correctly. When viewed as a text document, they are shown like below:
Dog,Cat,100,100,Fish
In a CSV file, there are four cells, with the values "Dog", "Cat", "100,000", "Fish". When I split on the "," to an array of strings, it contains 5 elements, when what I want is 4. Anyone know a way to work around this?
Thanks

There are two common mistakes made when reading csv code: using a split() function and using regular expressions. Both approaches are wrong, in that they are prone to corner cases such as yours and slower than they could be.
Instead, use a dedicated parser such as Microsoft.VisualBasic.TextFieldParser, CodeProject's FastCSV or Linq2csv, or my own implemention here on Stack Overflow.

Typically, CSV files would wrap these elements in quotes, causing your line to be displayed as:
Dog,Cat,"100,100",Fish
This would parse correctly (if using a reasonable method, ie: the TextFieldParser class or a 3rd party library), and avoid this issue.
I would consider your file as an error case - and would try to correct the issue on the generation side.
That being said, if that is not possible, you will need to have more information about the data structure in the file to correct this. For example, in this case, you know you should have 4 elements - if you find five, you may need to merge back together the 3rd and 4th, since those two represent the only number within the line.
This is not possible in a general case, however - for example, take the following:
100,100,100
If that is 2 numbers, should it be 100100, 100, or should it be 100, 100100? There is no way to determine this without more information.

you might want to have a look at the free opensource project FileHelpers. If you MUST use your own code, here is a primer on the CSV "standard" format

well you could always split on ("\",\"") and then trim the first and last element.
But I would look into regular expressions that match elements with in "".

Don't just split on the , split on ", ".
Better still, use a CSV library from google or codeplex etc
Reading a CSV file in .NET?

You may be able to use Regex.Replace to get rid of specifically the third comma as per below before parsing?
Replaces up to a specified number of occurrences of a pattern specified in the Regex constructor with a replacement string, starting at a specified character position in the input string. A MatchEvaluator delegate is called at each match to evaluate the replacement.
[C#] public string Replace(string, MatchEvaluator, int, int);

I ran into a similar issue with fields with line feeds in. Im not convinced this is elegant, but... For mine I basically chopped mine into lines, then if the line didnt start with a text delimeter, I appended it to the line above.
You could try something like this : Step through each field, if the field has an end text delimeter, move to the next, if not, grab the next field, appaend it, rince and repeat till you do have an end delimeter (allows for 1,000,000,000 etc) ..
(Im caffeine deprived, and hungry, I did write some code but it was so ugly, I didnt even post it)

Do you know that it will always contain exactly four columns? If so, this quick-and-dirty LINQ code would work:
string[] elements = line.Split(',');
string element1 = elements.ElementAt(0);
string element2 = elements.ElementAt(1);
// Exclude the first two elements and the last element.
var element3parts = elements.Skip(2).Take(elements.Count() - 3);
int element3 = Convert.ToInt32(string.Join("",element3parts));
string element4 = elements.Last();
Not elegant, but it works.